I guess I wouldn’t know as I haven’t lived in those states for extended periods of time, but having lived in South Dakota, I CAN tell you that the northern winters get VERY depressing… So I am a little shocked that more northern states weren’t on there.

And yes, we fly-over states do get a bad rap just because nobody wants to take the time to actually explore more than the coasts anymore. Kind of sad really.

I lived in Indiana for 18 years and I don’t find it depressing at all.

They talk about the poverty and economic downturn that has hit the more rural areas of these states particularly hard. And the states in the South and Midwest have a lot more rural area than most other states so they have more areas hit hard. But I don’t think that the cities in any of these 10 states are any different (depression inducing wise) than any other state.

I live in Michigan. And I am not at all suprised to see it on the list. Still havent hit warm weather (I’m still wearing my winter coat). The job issue also sucks, but it’s bad in other areas too. Hopefully things will start to look up soon.

The research was done using national health data; you can’t really make up which states have higher rates of this. While it is totally possibly to use statistics to skew a perspective, this seems to be a pretty straightforward case of counting. And as the article states, “mental distress is unusually and persistently common in some states, whether due to economic troubles, lack of access to health care, or other factors.” Even without reading it, I would expect the areas with the hightest rates also to have high rates of poverty, lack of access to healthcare, lack of jobs, high rates of natural disasters, etc. This isn’t particularly surprising or inflammatory.

I’m in Indiana, and I could see a bit of that. The place my dad works at is closing, so that’s about 600 jobs, Lily’s has had a ton of layoffs too, as well as a bunch of other employers. We also have awful air quality horrible construction and a number of other things that make my day suck :). Some parts of Indy are nice, but some are just sad looking.

I can kind of see why- a lot of the Southern states on the list get hit hard with natural disasters. Considering how much our city freaked out when we had our warnings the other week, too much of that could get really depressing.

I used to find Pennsylvania depressing until I went other places… then I realized I’d be so lost without having the beach a few hours away and tons of big cities to visit… I love being close to Ocean City/ Atlantic City and New York City… If I move out of this state it’ll be to another state on the coast… I would never want to live anywhere I’d have to fly to get to the ocean.